AZERTAG expressed protest to TASS

On July 31, the Russian Federation news agency TASS distributed a message with the headline "Monument to Aivazovsky demolished in Khankendi" (https://tass.ru/obschestvo/24675415), reports BAKU.WS with reference to AZERTAC.

As evident from the headline itself, the agency's management, with which AZERTAC has consistently maintained and valued good, partnership and even friendly relations for many decades, unexpectedly changed its previous course and retrieved from the dustbin of history the long-discarded toponym "Khankendi." Yet quite recently, the agency used the official and historical name of the city - Khankendi - in its reports (for example, on July 19 https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/24558165, July 24 https://tass.ru/politika/24602463, etc.). The attempt to revive within TASS the old name that is alien to the Azerbaijani people caused bewilderment and raised a fair question: what suddenly changed over the past week that made the Russian state news agency decide to "resurrect" a toponym from the long-gone Soviet period?

Khankendi is the historical name of the settlement that appeared at the end of the 18th century. Translated from Azerbaijani, it means "Khan's village." Khankendi was the location of Ibrahim Khalil Khan's estate, where a herd of Karabakh breed horses belonging to the ruler was kept.

After the creation of the Autonomous Region of Nagorno-Karabakh (ARNK) by the Bolshevik leadership on July 7, 1923, which in itself became a time bomb and laid the foundation for injustice and imbalance in the Armenian-Azerbaijani administrative-territorial demarcation, the administrative center of the autonomy - the city of Khankendi - was renamed on August 10 of the same year to "Khankendi" in honor of, as written in Soviet historiography, "the leader of the Baku Commune," but in reality, the bloody executioner of the Azerbaijani people, Stepan Shahumyan.

On November 26, 1991, by decision of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the city was returned to its former historical name. On October 15, 2023, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev raised the state flag of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the main square of the city, and on the day of the last presidential elections on February 7, 2024, he voted in this city, calling the ballot he dropped into the box "the last nail driven into the coffin of Armenian separatists."

The headline and text of today's TASS message caused bewilderment and even outrage in Azerbaijani society. The departure of the Russian state media leadership from its previous course undermines the traditionally friendly relations between our agencies and teams and sends a dangerous signal to the entire Russian media space. Guided solely by goodwill and the desire to preserve the long-standing ties between our two agencies, AZERTAC calls on colleagues from TASS to refrain from repeating such actions in the future and to direct all efforts toward improving relations instead of deepening possible disagreements.

For its part, AZERTAC is authorized to state that the agency is committed to maintaining good relations with TASS, while expecting Russian colleagues to correct the mistake made. If the Azerbaijani side does not see reciprocity and understanding, then with great regret we will be forced to respond by remembering and beginning to use the historical names of the cities of Kaliningrad (Königsberg), Orenburg (Orynbor), Volgograd (Sarysu), Grozny (Solzha-Gala), Novorossiysk (Sujuk-Kale), Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Toyohara), Yuzhno-Kurilsk (Furukamappu), Petrozavodsk (Petroskoi), Izhevsk (Izhkar), the Volga River (Itil) and a number of other names.